Thousands of brass and bronze plaques, heads, and figures cast by the Edo people for the royal court of the Kingdom of Benin, in present-day Edo State, Nigeria, from at least the sixteenth century, within a court casting tradition whose roots may reach earlier. Made largely by lost-wax casting in brass for the palace of the Oba, they recorded court history and ritual in metal. In 1897 a British military expedition sacked Benin City and looted the works, which were sold across Europe and America. They are now the central case in the global debate over returning objects taken in the colonial era.
A reader walking through a great European museum in 1900 would have met a quiet contradiction. On the wall hung brass plaques of astonishing control: figures in deep relief, drapery and coral regalia rendered with a jeweller's precision. The labels often called the people who made them primitive. The objects refused the label. They had been cast by a method as exacting as anything in Renaissance Florence, in a West African city most European visitors had never seen, by a kingdom Britain had burned three years earlier to take exactly these things.